handyfloss

I am facing, right now, a task that is paradigmatic of when a GUI ([[Graphical user interface]]) would be preferable over a [[command line interface]]: cropping a picture to extract a fragment (a face in a bigger picture, more precisely).

One would, of course, open [[GIMP]], select the area to cut, then “save as”, e voilà! Sort of. First, starting GIMP is not incredibly fast. Then, you have to:

1. Select the “Selection” tool (with the mouse! That’s so slow)
2. Use the tool to select the region (with the mouse!)
3. Open the “Edit” menu (right click)
4. Choose “Copy” (with the mouse!)
5. Open the menu again, and choose “Paste selection as new” (with the… you get it)
6. Go to the newly opened picture, then “Save as”
7. Introduce name
8. Accept in the “Export” menu, when prompted about some transparency thingie
9. Choose some JPG parameters, like quality
10. Close GIMP

Of course, if you don’t like the result, you have to repeat everything. Then you will realize that the resulting file is too big, and will use [[ImageMagick]] to reduce it.

After doing the above, y resorted to convert, the tool of the [[ImageMagick]] suite that has save my *ss more times than I can count.

With convert, you write a (apparently cryptic and complex) command line once, and then you can reuse it. Cropping a region of an image blindly seems highly problematic, but it isn’t. You just choose a width, height and (x,y) position of top corner and run. If the result is too wide or whatever, you just rerun the command (hitting once the “up” arrow of the keyboard to rescue the last command, then modify at will).

The command line I am using:

convert source_image -crop WxH+x+y cropped_image && display -resize 50% cropped_image

After just a couple of runs (modifying W, H, x and y depending on the previous run), I obtained the desired result.

I decided to give a try to Ubuntu Hardy Heron, and installed the [[amd64]] version of it in my laptop.

My gripe is caused by a really annoying issue with the installation in a multiboot system. I have a laptop with four root partitions (Windows, Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu), and obviously [[GRUB]] generates the menu that allows me to choose at boot time. The file that GRUB reads is /root/grub/menu.lst, at /dev/sda5 (the Fedora partition, which was the last one).

The annoying issue I mention is that the installation is absolutely smooth but a [[bootloader]] is not installer. What this means is that when I reboot the computer after installation, I always get the old GRUB menu, and the new OS does not appear in the list.

The only solution I found is to do the following:

1. Do a normal install of Ubuntu, but do not reboot
2. Open a console (after installation Ubuntu lauches a GNOME live session)
3. Locate the kernel and initrd images I need. They are, respectively: /target/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-generic and /target/boot/initrd-img-2.6.24-16-generic.bak
4. Mount /dev/sda5 into /mnt/root3
5. Edit /mnt/root3/boot/grub/menu.lst (the old GRUB menu), and add the lines:

title --------- Ubuntu 8.04 TLS Hardy Heron - sda6 ----------
root

title Ubuntu Hardy Heron - kernel 2.6.24
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-generic root=/dev/sda6 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-16-generic.bak
boot

6. Reboot

After that, the new Ubuntu appears in the GRUB list.

The procedure is not incredibly difficult, but for a beginner it would be a major showstopper. And, in any case, it is a really sad error.

Remember Project BHS? It is an effort I am making to log the evolution of Windows/Linux/Mac/Other market share, via the respective contributions to [[BOINC]] projects.

I have taken a further (and very crude) step towards the estimation of when will the Beast from Redmond fall, by extrapolating the “Number of hosts vs. time” curves to the points of crossing. For that I have fitted the data so far to (very crude, I know) second order polynomials (with [[Xmgrace]]), and calculated the crossing points (with [[GNU Octave]]).

The results can be:

1. Windows seems to go upwards and Linux/Mac downwards (will never cross)
2. The crossing point is above 100% or below 0% market share: the extrapolation is unfit (will never cross)
3. There is a crossing point and lies within 0-100% market share: that’s the World Domintion date!!

I will be posting data for different projects, along with a “confidence” percent. This value corresponds to the fraction of the total time required for Linux/Mac to overcome Windows (according to the present tendency) that is represented in the collected data. If 10-day data suggests that Linux will overcome Windows in 1000 days, then the result is not really very trustable. OTOH, 999-day data suggesting the same is compelling.

An important notice: expected times are not measured from “now”, but from the moment I started collecting data, on Feb 3, 2008 (3 months ago).

The following table illustrates the aforementioned data for some selected projects, with time in days and confidence percent in parenthesis.

As an example, the curve fits and corresponding crossing points are given in the following figure, for the case of SETI@Home. You can infer the limited trustability of the predictions from the tiny time extent of the data points used to extrapolate the curves. As time goes by, curves will be more and more trustable, so expect updates to this “project”.

SETI@Home data (click to enlarge)

The software used to process the data is BHS, and can be found at my home page.

Leo en Barrapunto (vale, la noticia tiene 2 semanas, pero es que últimamente leo poco las noticias en Internet), que tanto Eroski como el ayuntamiento de Zornotza han migrado al software libre OpenBravo para sus necesidades de ERP. La noticia tomada de empresadigitala.net.

Following the “report” series started with my first summary of info about the music collection I listen to, I will update that info in this post.

The data (in parentheses the difference with respect to last report, 5 months ago).

Files

Total files        8073 (+1037)
  - Commercial     4987 (+522)
  - Jamendo        3001 (+468)
  - Other CC       31 (+0)
  - Other          54 (+47)
Total playtime     21d (+3d)
Disk usage         38GB (+6GB)
Artist count       1034 (+217)
Album count        738 (+120)
MP3 count          0 (+0)
OGG count          8073 (+1037)

Last.fm

Playcount           36279 (+10033)

Most played artists Joaquín Sabina - 2516 (+264)
                    The Beatles - 1228 (+245)
                    David TMX - 771 (+172)
                    Silvio Rodríguez - 745 (+119)
                    Fito & Fitipaldis - 622
                    Siniestro Total - 611 (+75)
                    Bad Religion - 573
                    La Polla Records - 537
                    Extremoduro - 443
                    Ska-P - 420

Most played songs   Cuando aparezca el petróleo (E. Sánchez) - 56 (+14)
                    La del pirata cojo (J. Sabina) - 52 (+5)
                    Conductores suicidas (J. Sabina) - 48 (+2)
                    Tirado en la calle (E. Sánchez) - 46
                    Y sin embargo (J. Sabina) - 45 (+5)
                    Pacto entre caballeros (J. Sabina) - 45 (+3)

Amarok

Playcount         25596 (+7410)

Favorite artists  Ska-P - 95.08%
                  Leihotikan - 94.39%
                  Rafael Caballero - 94.30%
                  Su ta Gar - 94.10% (+2.24)
                  NanowaR - 94.02%
                  Simon and Garfunkel - 93.84%
                  Juan Luis Guerra - 93.65% (+0.8)
                  La Caja Negra - 93.57% (+1.93)
                  Peiremans - 93.48% (+1.52)

Favorite songs    You shook me all night long (AC/DC) - 99%
                  Km 0 (I. Serrano) - 98%
                  Salir (Extremoduro) - 98%
                  1st movement of Winter (A. Vivaldi) - 98%
                  Torn (N. Imbruglia) - 98%
                  Total eclipse of the heart (B. Tyler) - 98%
                  Todos los segundos cuentan (La Caja Negra) - 98%
                  Fiesta pagana (Mägo de Oz) - 98%
                  New America (Bad Religion) - 98%
                  Las cuatro y diez (L.E. Aute and S. Rodríguez) - 98%
                  Soldadito marinero (Fito & Fitipaldis) - 98%
                  Cuando aparezca el petróleo (E. Sánchez) - 98%
                  Jet pilot (System of a Down) - 98%
                  Tirado en la calle (E. Sánchez) - 98%

Remember [[Sony]] as the paladin of anti-piracy? Sony is the company behind [[Blu-ray]], a format aiming at substituting [[DVD]], devised only as a mean to avoid “piracy” (implementing [[HDMI]] connections with [[HDCP]] [[Digital rights management|DRM]] systems), and offering nothing more than 4 or 5 times better resolution (such a low price for our freedom!)

Sony is, as well, the company behind the [[XCP]] fiasco I wrote about a couple of years ago, in which they introduced malicious software (a [[rootkit]]) in their music CDs, to control what consumers copied or listened to.

Well, this saints among the saints have been apparently caught using… what?… using pirated software!!!

Read abut it in Slashdot (where I found the new), and in ZeroPaid (original new).

As outlined in some previous posts[1,2,3,4], I have been playing around with a piece of Python code to process some log files. The log files to process were actually host.gz files from some [[BOINC]] projects, and the data I want to extract from them is quite simple: the Windows, Linux and Mac shares in the number of computers contributing to them (and the [[BOINC Credit System|work they do]]). By logging this processed data myself, I can see the time evolution of this share, and hopefully show the slow but steady rise of GNU/Linux :^)

I figured out that the contribution to distributed computing projects could be a reasonable indicator of the Windows predominance status. There are many other indicators (for example the number of visits to a web site, e.g. this very one), and I don’t claim that this one is “better”. I just want to add it to the reference list for the reader.

There is a problem with “Windows vs. Linux” figures, and it is that they are not really “competing” products. When cars or soft drinks are the subject, one can figure out the [[market share]], looking at the number of items sold. Linux being [[free software]], one can hardly measure the amount of “sold copies”, and with Windows being pre-installed in most new computers, one can not really trust the “number of computers sold = number of Windows copies sold”, because some users even remove the Windows partition and install Linux on top of it.

Counting the visits to some sites is not without problems, either. Any web site will have a particular audience, and the result will be biased by that fact. When my blog was in WordPress.com, I had roughly as many visits from Windows users as from Linux users, and almost all of them used Firefox as a browser. Obviously this data is not an accurate reflection of the world at large. It so happened that free software users are more likely to surf to sites like mine, hence the bias.

So, without further ado, let me introduce the “BOINC Host Statistics” program (BHS). Here you are a link to its home page. You can find results I have harvested so far in the Screenshots section. For example, the SETI@home credit generation rate statistics follows:

What the plot tells us is that (at the time of writing this) 500 million [[BOINC Credit System|cobblestones]] are being granted to contributors each day. Of them, around 82% are being given to Windows computers, 9-10% to Mac, 8% to GNU/Linux, and the rest to computers running other OSs.

Another reason to love FLOSS: developers are close to the users, and they LISTEN.

I recently started using the Sociable WordPress plugin for this blog. This wonderful plugin by Joost de Valk, lets you put some links to social bookmarking/news/recommendation sites on the web at the bottom of each post, so a reader can send your post to such a site with a single click.

There are many WP plugins that do this, but I liked the looks of Joost’s, and the pleasant way of managing it. I chose Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, Technorati and Slashdot, but I felt that at least two sites that I liked were missing from the available sites list: Menéame and Barrapunto.

So I boldly decided to contact the developer, Joost de Valk, and ask for them:

Hi Joost,

I have just discovered your “Sociable” WordPress plugin, and I like it a lot.

However, there is always room for improvement, and as such I would like to suggest you to add links to the following sites:

Menéame (http://meneame.net/)
Barrapunto (http://barrapunto.com/)

Both are Spanish “versions” of popular sites: Digg and Slashdot, respectively.

I mainly write in English, but I think that blogs with a Spanish audience could benefit a lot from these links.

Now I realize I even forgot to say “thanks in advance” or anything… I was a bit unpolite, I fear. Anyway, his answer came a couple of days later:

I’ll add them in the next version, coming out… tonight I guess :)

Can I trust upon you to promote it a bit there? :)

Cheers,
Joost

It is actually true that a new version of Sociable has been released, and it includes Menéame and Barrapunto as available sites. So here it goes your promotion, Joost ;^)

Isn’t it great when people collaborate and are generally nice to each other? Isn’t everyone tired of a society where people don’t do anything unless they get money or power in return?

Thanks Joost and other bona fide developers for your great work.

Vaya por delante que no conozco nada de Arsys, y que (por ahora) no tengo nada que ver con ellos. Simplemente quería compartir el hecho de que he vistado su página (fantaseando con adquirir un dominio propio), y he visto esto:

¿Nada raro? Pues fijáos en que, como buen servicio relacionado con Internet, tiene una fotico con un señor y un navegador web abierto… ¿Internet Explorer? Yo creo que no…

Esta mañana en La Mirada Crítica de Telecinco han hablado sobre conciliación de la vida laboral y personal, y sobre el “teletrabajo” (trabajar desde casa).

Como ejemplo han mencionado Igalia, y han entrevistado in situ a un par de trabajadores de dicha empresa. ¿Por qué lo menciono? Pues porque Igalia es una empresa dedicada al software libre (hecho que los entrevistados han mencionado dos veces en la breve entrevista), y porque T5 ha dicho que Igalia factura un millón de euros al año (o sea, que funciona bien).

Al describir las facilidades (horario flexible, ayudas para guarderías, etc.) que daba Igalia a sus trabajadores, me ha recordado, salvando las distancias, a Google, que repite como mejor empresa estadounidense donde trabajar, según Fortune.

Cerraba el presentador diciendo: “[…] claro, no todas las empresas trabajan en un sector que esto pueda hacerse”. Se refería a IT, obviamente, pero se hace extensivo a, concretamente, el software libre. ¡Trabajad con SL, que se vive mejor!